British Art Studies September 2019 London, Asia, Exhibitions, Histories

British Art Studies September 2019 London, Asia, Exhibitions, Histories Edited by Hammad Nasar and Sarah Victoria Turner British Art Studies Issue 13, published 30 September 2019 London, Asia, Exhibitions, Histories Edited by Hammad Nasar and Sarah Victoria Turner Cover image: Rubber shavings made during Bettina Fung's performance of "Towards All or Nothing (In Memory of Li Yuan-chia)" at Manchester Art Gallery, 6 March 2019.. Digital image courtesy of Bettina Fung. PDF generated on 2 February 2021 Note: British Art Studies is a digital publication and intended to be experienced online and referenced digitally. PDFs are provided for ease of reading offline. Please do not reference the PDF in academic citations: we recommend the use of DOIs (digital object identifiers) provided within the online article. Theseunique alphanumeric strings identify content and provide a persistent link to a location on the internet. A DOI is guaranteed never to change, so you can use it to link permanently to electronic documents with confidence. Published by: Paul Mellon Centre 16 Bedford Square London, WC1B 3JA https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk In partnership with: Yale Center for British Art 1080 Chapel Street New Haven, Connecticut https://britishart.yale.edu ISSN: 2058-5462 DOI: 10.17658/issn.2058-5462 URL: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk Editorial team: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/about/editorial-team Advisory board: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/about/advisory-board Produced in the United Kingdom. A joint publication by Contents Journeying through Modernism: Travels and Transits of East Pakistani Artists in Post-Imperial London, Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason Journeying through Modernism: Travels and Transits of East Pakistani Artists in Post-Imperial London Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason Abstract This article explores the journeys of two key twentieth-century artists from East Pakistan—Zainul Abedin and S.M. Sultan—to and through post-imperial London in the early 1950s. Sultan’s cosmopolitan journeying, from Calcutta through Karachi and Lahore, to the USA and through London, to eventually settle in the countryside of Eastern Bengal, left traces in his practice, philosophy, and the narratives that have come to surround his work. Abedin’s London stay was both as an artist from the former colonies and as an East Pakistani cultural bureaucrat representing the post-colonial nation- state of Pakistan. These two very different journeys are approached yb the co-authors from two different disciplinary traditions (anthropology and history), to bring into focus the concept of “journeys of post-colonial modernisms.” We show how the case of East Pakistan, with its incomplete decolonisation, shaped the travels and trajectories of these two artists and the ways in which their work was received and exhibited. We also show that this cannot be understood without the context of the Cold War, which facilitated particular routes for travel to and through art institutions globally, and which was to become crucial in shaping practice as well as conferring canonicity. Authors Lotte Hoek is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and Head of Social Anthropology. Sanjukta Sunderason is Assistant Professor in Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Acknowledgements We are thankful for the conversations we have had with colleagues as part of the conference, Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain 1900–Now on 30 June–1 July 2016 at the Paul Mellon Centre, London. We are thankful to Brinda Kumar, Ming Tiampo, Diana Campbell-Betancourt, Catherine Masud, Christopher Phillips, and Lisa Campbell of the University of Michigan. We thank Mainul Abedin for providing access to Zainul Abedin’s personal papers. Cite as Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason, "Journeying through Modernism: Travels and Transits of East Pakistani Artists in Post-Imperial London", British Art Studies, Issue 13, https://dx.doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-13/ hoek-sunderason Introduction In the early 1950s, two artists from East Pakistan (Bangladesh, post-1971) travelled through London and showed their work there. Today, each is considered a protagonist in the story of Bangladeshi art, but back then, the routes and reception of Zainul Abedin and S.M. Sultan could hardly have been more different. Zainul Abedin, already a well-established artistand founder of the Institute of Fine Art in Dhaka, visited London’s Slade School of Fine Art on a Commonwealth fellowship in 1951–1952. S.M. Sultan was a promising young artist who travelled through London in 1952 en route back to Pakistan from his study-tour to the United States sponsored by the Institute of International Education (IIE). Comparing the journeys of Abedin and Sultan through London, and their exhibition practices and critical receptions, sheds light on the question of what it meant to be a South Asian artist in newly decolonising London of the 1950s. What did London, emerging from the experiences of a second world war and in the throes of end of the British Empire, look like for artists from the newly post-colonial nation-states journeying through the spaces, galleries, and institutions of the city? The material presented in this article answers such questions in the light of the journeys of these two significant East Pakistani artists, studies fo whose lives and work have remained limited, especially for this early post-colonial period. The two individual, and often idiosyncratic, routes through London we trace here also provoke larger questions about how modernism was lived, shaped, and experienced by black artists in early post-colonial Britain, both in terms of an embodied artistic practice and as a set of institutional, personal, and artistic pathways that facilitated their movements, visibility and work. 1 Following Abedin and Sultan along their journeys highlights the often contradictory and complex infrastructures by which the art worlds of the newly independent Commonwealth connected with its metropolitan centre. Their journeys through the city show how certain ideals of modernism that animated its art world at the time were actualised and articulated in this early stage of London’s post-colonial trajectory. These journeys provide the means by which to evaluate the possibilities and limitations offered by modernism, the infrastructures of the art world, and by the metropolis to South Asian artists in the years immediately following independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Following the travels of Zainul Abedin and S.M Sultan in the early 1950s London reveals the city as a crossroads where multiple modalities of post- colonial modernisms operated. It opens up the very idea of the journey as a means by which to think about the ways in which artists like Abedin and Sultan encountered and lived the trajectory of post-war and post-colonial modernism. 2 While laying out the particular journeys of these artists through London, we also use the idea of the journey as a sensitising concept by which to explore infrastructures, aesthetics, and ideologies of the 1950s Commonwealth art world as it was encountered in movement. To do so, we first lay out briefly how we use the notion of the journey in terms ofthe artistic trajectories of Abedin and Sultan, as well as in terms of a passage across two disciplinary approaches that we bring to this project as authors—the approaches of history and anthropology. 3 Second, we detail the two journeys made by Abedin and Sultan through London. Finally, we compare these journeys to parse the economies of encounter that marked artists and artworks as they journeyed within the already hierarchised spatial politics between South Asia and Britain. We believe this early moment in the recalibration of such a hierarchical set of routes and connections between Britain and South Asia is formative of subsequent engagements by South Asian artists with British art worlds. Journeying Through Both Zainul Abedin and S.M. Sultan travelled through, rather than to, London. Their intentions were never to remain there and their participation in London’s art worlds was temporally and spatially delimited. Nonetheless, retrospectively, these relatively brief periods of movement through London have, for both, been posited as significant and have allowed both artists to be inscribed into a larger, global narrative of (post-colonial) modernism. Our tracing of their journeys through London will illustrate that their movement through the decolonising capital was not a straightforward initiation into metropolitan modernism that was then returned to the former colony. Instead, the journey, beginning well before and continuing on from London, highlights the disjunctures in such a seamless narrative. This speaks of the nature of post-colonial modernism in its immediate post-imperial formations rather than somehow a failure on the part of these two artists to “live up” to the promises extended by this ideological and aesthetic repertoire in a newly decolonising world. The journeys by Abedin and Sultan through London and through modernism can be seen as a constitutive part of their artistic practices. We draw on Tim Ingold’s notion of making as a form of “procession”, “a passage along a path in which every step grows from the one before it and into the one following, on an itinerary that always overshoots its destination.” 4 We take to heart this dialectic of making and movement in our assessment of the ways in which travels through London were part of an itinerary and iteration for the two East Pakistani artists we discuss in this article. Given the fact that for both artists the period following the journey through London has been described as one of a certain form of absence, both sunk into the “ethnographic” or folk in different but equally un-esteemed ways: the idea of making art as a form of a journey that is inevitably one of a productive overshooting of destinations and ends is helpful in rethinking what travel through the metropolitan centre allowed to be produced in its wake.

Load more